


Destroy

by BabylonSabby



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, M/M, More Strider brotherly bonding, Other, Sequel, break - Freeform, destroy, upd8 reaction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-25
Updated: 2016-03-25
Packaged: 2018-05-28 22:17:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6347725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BabylonSabby/pseuds/BabylonSabby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sequel to Break, but could be it's own, stand alone fic. While waiting for End Game on the frog disc, the Strider brothers confront each other about their sexuality.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Destroy

You’re Dirk years in the future. Dave is asleep in his crib. He literally sleeps like a rock. You want him to stay that way. Hardened and impenetrable. Not a single thing is going to be able to touch him. If you can help it, if you can do a single thing for him, you’re going to help him live. He has to live. There’s no other choice. He has to finish…what you couldn’t. You failed him. A long time ago. You just wanted to make him proud…and you fucked up.

He’s a tiny baby now, but in a way he’s still your guardian and you feel ashamed.

You’re still a child in your own right, even though you’re approaching middle aged. There are sometimes when a child just has to give up and leave everything to the stronger one, the parent. Dave was that for you once upon a time. And you don’t think you have it in you anymore…to go on for much longer. So he has to do it for you. He has to pick up the slack. Take up the torch…and fight the battle the two of you have been fighting God knows how long.

You want nothing more for it to end.

They say the soul is immortal. Well, if it is, it’s definitely not immune to time. You can feel its weariness inside. An ancient thing, indeed, but no less frustrated by the repetition of this endless loop of events. If Dave doesn’t make it, you’ve failed him again. And for the last time. Because you have plans to just give up. You’ll tell the others. And you’ll sacrifice everything. You hope that they’re just as desperate as you, but you know they aren’t. Their minds aren’t constantly fatigued by a demonic, possessed doll currently under your supervision.

The thing you want to bring home, however, is that ultimately you’re still a fucking teenager deep, deep down. You haven’t grown at all. If anything you’re a lot more jaded than you used to be and you were already pretty existential when you were young. As you curl up into a squatted position on the floor, balancing on the pads of your feet, you try to drown out the noises and voices that keep bothering you and hassling you. You’re getting pretty fucking desperate. And it’s not just the voices. It’s that overbearing fear that you can’t do anything right. You’re lonely. Scared. You want someone living to shelter you for a bit. A warm tower of comfort to hide against for a while. You’re also worried that if you fuck up once, just once, that Dave will reject you. You can’t say anything. You can’t say fucking anything. He can’t know. 

++++

You would have never guessed the impact any of this would have had on the future. Long after your death and eventual ‘reincarnation’. Dave has you pegged for some kind of ‘god’. You’d laugh if it didn’t mean offending him. You tell him you’re just a fuck up. But it’s only just now that you’re starting to figure out all that suppression, all that…fear you had as a Guardian…has affected Dave and how he’s raised you. The fuck up of all fuck ups!

Both of you are on the silver ‘lily pad’ now. You’re both spritey, teenaged twins ignited in destiny that’s hushed itself over the blackened voidscape.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Dave whispers, his voice starting to quiver again for another round of tears.

The only reason you’re even having this conversation is because you haven’t been able to avoid the topic of Jake, who just so happens to be sitting not too far away from you. He looks, very awkwardly, like he’s trying to avoid you. Like he’s trying to avoid everybody. In the heat of reuniting, you and Dave got caught up on a fuck-ton of things. One of them being the discovery of your respective sexual orientations. Jakey-wakey over there, Dave has only just now found out, is your ex-boyfriend.

You find yourself confessing in gradual waves of anxiety. 

Little by little…you spill the beans.

You’ve kept this secret for so long.

But now it’s just coming out of you and you fucking can’t stop it. It goes from waves to straight up word vomit.

“I didn’t think you’d like me,” you say frankly. “If I’m anything in your time like I am now…I’m telling you this now because I’ve kept it secret for so long.”

“I honest to God could give less of a fuck, Dirk.”

“…You didn’t act like that when I was little.”

“What did I act like?”

You shrug.

“I don’t know…Not cruel, really, but it just felt like it was something that I might have to have kept to myself. It wasn’t just you, either, it was…everyone. I didn’t have a whole lot of friends as it was. I didn’t want to be alone. Nobody could know.”

“Did Rox know?”

You smile…just a bit.

“Yeah, she knew.”

“Jane?”

“Yeah.”

“So this whole time. My whole life. You just never told me because you were scared I’d…basically disown you? Even as a kid?”

“Pretty much.”

Dave becomes pensive, which gives you time to reflect. You imagine yourself as a man. Hiding his sexuality from his younger brother. Yeah. You’re pretty damn sure that in the wake of the Apocalypse, Dave needed a lot of things. A teacher. A role model. A capable warrior. Little could be personal if you were going to get things done efficiently. And never could the subject of homosexuality, specifically yours, be brought up. You realize in that moment that the two of you simultaneously, whether you realized it or not, fed an endless cycle of perpetuating homophobia among your own goddamn selves. 

“I…” Dave breathes.

You stare at him in anticipation, half frozen in fear. But your eyes are wide with hope, astonishingly so.

“I died really early, didn’t I?”

“Yeah…” 

He sighs, seeming to look down for a bit before lifting his face back up at your own.

“Maybe it was too early to tell you a lot of things, then. Things I probably wanted to say. Things like how much I loved you and admired you. How cool and awesome I thought you were. Things I would have been unafraid to tell you—I mean…I would have taught you this was okay!”

“You would’ve?” 

You blink. Your breath is hitched. This is swiftly becoming dream-like. Because you’ve actually imagined this before. Him saying all these things. Things you wanted him to say, but never thought in a million years he would.

“Yes! When I acted homophobic, was it in a serious manner or an ironic one?”

“Well, your movies kind of…I don’t know. It was hard to tell some times. But I always figured that you only said those things because you were supposed to. We were in Texas and it wasn’t right. I just…got the feeling that it wasn’t right. Wasn’t supposed to be right. Everyone else was saying it was wrong. And then you make a gay joke in a movie that feels kind of like it’s at my expense, almost. So I just figured…you were being serious. I felt for a long time that I was a freak. That I didn’t belong. But when I met my friends online, the closer we got the more open I was about it. They didn’t say a lot of the same things. It felt like it kind of just rolled off their shoulders. I’d never encountered such a response before, few people as there were. But Texas. Texas was the capitol of fiery, deadly, homophobic injustice. If I was going to burn in Hell, all I had to do was step right outside.”

Dave sits frozen before you. He’s shaking his head, seeming to struggle with every single bit of this in a despairing sort of way.

“I don’t know…what I was thinking. This was probably a timeline in which I was still struggling with myself. Or maybe I was being sarcastic, I don’t know. But I would have never in a million years let you go on believing that, if I could have helped it.”

Just when you’re about to ask him if he’s gay, too, he smiles sort of…wistfully…and speaks before you have a chance.

“In this timeline, though, I think my future self would be different. Like I told John earlier, I’ve had a lot of fucking time to sit around on that meteor. Growing up, I thought homosexuality was wrong, too.”

“God,” you growl, “it was fucking my fault, I know it!”

You’re throwing your head back, fingers buried in your hair. But no sooner does your head snap forward that Dave’s fingertip is right against your nose.

“Let me finish,” he says sternly, the finger eventually lowering. “I didn’t realize until much later that when I acted like a tough shit, it was a front. And I got to thinking about it…and the more I thought about it the more I discovered that not only was it not wrong, but that all those stereotypes and rules laid down by society weren’t worth a fucking hill of beans! They were just meaningless! Not just because everyone was dead, but because they literally had no grounding in reality at all! Humans are sentient beings capable of…just about anything! Nothing is evil for the sake of being evil and at the same time, nobody’s inherently ‘good’, either! So what the fuck, in the end..was so goddamn wrong with homosexuality in the first place?! Every answer I got to that question was a bigoted one grounded in religion! And everything even remotely related to scientific reasoning or biology against it was easily disproved by something more coherent!”

You grin.

“You’re starting to sound like me a little bit.”

“Fucking write that shit down, I want it in writing so I can shove it in Roxy’s face.”

“Will do. But, Dave,” you pause, “…when you say you ‘struggled’ with yourself…does that mean you also weren’t as straight as you originally thought?”

“You’re damn right it does. Now, I’m not saying I’m…full on homo. I think I’ve been attracted to too many girls to say I’m all the homo. But I’m not going to sit here and discredit a single ounce of the fact that somewhere hiding inside me was…something else. And that’s what scared me. It was there. Plain as day. Just sitting there. The old elephant in the room. It was quiet. Lurking among other thoughts, more heteronormative thoughts. More ‘front’ thoughts probably all active in trying to hide it. And…it seemed at peace with its own self. Like it was just this force of nature that had been there this whole time and I was only just now seeing it. But I was at odds with it. Everyone in the fucking world was telling me it was wrong. I even thought that…you thought it was wrong…”

“Oh, my fuck.”

“I know.”

By now, you are lifting an arm so that the tips of your fingers can graze the back of your neck. You look around at the others quietly, your mind a shore of thoughts. Waves of thoughts throwing themselves on a sandy shoreline. 

“You can probably say the trolls helped me out,” Dave continues, seeming to catch on to the fact that you’re studying his compatriots pretty thoughtfully. “They just don’t do a lot of the things we do. They don’t even have a fucking word for homosexuality. For them, it’s not even a thing that exists because…all love is the same. All reproduction is the same.”

“All genders are the same?” you pique.

“I’m guessing. For the most part, maybe. It’s definitely not like Earth. Texas more notably. The longer I got to know them the more I gradually started to make peace with myself. I got educated. Seriously educated. And finally, it felt like I’d learned all there was to learn. Homosexuality was harmless. Everything seemed harmless. A lot of people make your…discovering this out to be this big, liberating experience, but for me it was more soft than that. Much more quiet and gentle. It was like I had just accepted it and that was that. And I instantly forgot all that inner turmoil from homophobic rants past.” 

You can’t believe what you’re hearing. Your face remains stoic, but inside you’re elated. You’re not just ‘flying’, you’re skyrocketing. It’s not just that no longer do you have to hide anything anymore. It’s that on top of that, you share some common ground with your brother. You have a connection.

“I’m going to go out on a limb…and assume that this discovery was not without you being interested in at least one boy. You had to find out some how.”

“Oh, I was interested in a fucking ton of them.”

You almost bust out laughing.

“Really?!”

“Yes! I was surrounded! I was fucking…surrounded, you don’t understand. They were fucking everywhere—”

“I know!” You roar. 

“But then I was also surrounded by a lot of equally hot girls, so…Sometimes it was really confusing and taxing on myself. I thought if I’d just ‘pick one’, it’d be easier on my life.”

You shrug. You think about saying, “I don’t have that problem,” but don’t. Instead something else has come to mind.

“I think Roxy’s beautiful, but I don’t know if I could ever….you know.”

“Y-yeah.”

His face gets a little pinkish. Yours is warm, so you imagine it’s getting a little pink, too.

Whoopsiiiesss. The ‘sex’ has been brought up. And now you’re both kind of sitting there awkwardly huddled across from each other. Karkat’s voice echoes from across the disc.

“Oh, my fucking God, how does your species accomplish anything, it’s just so…stupid.”

Dave snickers, smiling at you. He turns his head ever so slightly in Karkat’s direction and then brings it back.

“Hey…” you mutter softly, “…Are we….brothering?”

“Yes. I think we’re doing the brother.”

“Oh, God, that was—”

“I know, ‘phrasing’, shut up.”

But you can’t shut up. If you try to shut up, you’re probably going to suffocate on your own oxygen. Or lack thereof. You’re kind of in space? But you’re a god, so fuck it. So you just try and see what a very muffled and strained bout of laughter does as its hidden behind your palm.

Welp. Now you kind of have some odd clue what the fuck is going on with this loop thing. And if Dave’s right, and the loop continues…you think he might be a different Dave. And you might be a different Dirk.

“If round two of my parenting comes into play…Can I count on you to punch me in the face if I get too rough?”

“If I can land a punch, I will punch you. Right in the face.”

“I’d punch me in the face.”

“I’D PUNCH YOU IN THE FACE!”

“Oh, my God, Jake!!”

You get up and run over to him. He’s glaring you, but you don’t take it to heart because the first thing you do is ruffle his hair and take him into the largest hug you think you’ve ever enveloped him in. He’s entangled momentarily. He isn’t getting out. But then, he isn’t fighting, either. He’s actually laughing.

“You can punch me in the face,” you hum happily, instinctively kissing the side of his face once. Maybe two times. Okay, it’s three times.

“I don’t know…You’re awfully quick,” Jake muses. “If you’d sit still long enough, I might actually make it.”

“I’ll let you punch me right now. I’m right here, buddy. I’m wide open.”

He lifts a hand. It hesitates. It’s balled into a fist, but it’s just sitting there. Finally, its knuckles thunk against your jawline.

“Fffff—I can’t,” the youth seems to say bashfully, resting his forehead against your shoulder. A chuckle is released from his throat. “Even if I wanted to, I don’t think I actually could.”

“If I pissed you off hard enough, I bet you could.”

“I don’t think you’ve ever actually pissed me off that much…”

“I hope I never do.”

You embrace him. Smiling, you rest the side of your face against his own. Everything’s still and quiet.

You’re actually so enamored with your reunion with Jake that you don’t notice Dave’s smile slacken a bit. It stays. Lingers. But becomes sort of bittersweet. When you do notice, it makes you double-take. You have to glance twice just to make sure he’s expressing what you think he’s expressing.

You give Jake another ginger hug before releasing him.

“Sorry, bud. Be right back,” you whisper.

You approaching him gradually. Maybe even cautiously. But when you’re just inches from him, you stop. And smile. 

You’re still smiling when he looks back up at you.

You kneel just enough to crouch and rest a hand atop his shoulder. You know normally this would be a no-no, but you figure old rules could be thrown out the window for just a little bit. Your hand lifts…and it removes the triangular shades protecting your eyes. They’re lifted just enough so they can rest on your head.

“You’ll say something to me, right? If it happens?”

Dave slowly starts to smile again. He nods.

“But,” he interjects, “…What if it’s life or death and you really need to teach me something? About being a warrior?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” you almost groan out in a sigh. You’re just so done with all of it. So exhausted and…done. “Dave. I would rather us die knowing what love feels like than…being lonely for the sake of survival.”

“At the planet’s expense?”

“Honestly?….Yeah. And you know what else? I’m thinking…it might actually help you be a better fighter if you have something to fight for. I wanna teach you that early, I think. If the time ever comes again.”

“I wanna teach you that, too,” he smiles.

“Now that we’re both kind of…out of the closet…Do you think things will get better?”

“Dude, they already are better. Just cut the bullshit and say you fucking love me, goddamnit.”

He’s not two seconds in and he’s already leaning forward to hug you. You not only just let it happen, but you return it. 

Your face is on fire. Tears are burning at the corners of your eyes and you’re looking at everyone watching you. You’re almost embarrassed. Count on Dave to reassure you just at that moment, too.

“We gotta destroy every ounce of fucking ‘no homo’ we can, man. This has to end today. I want to be able to hug and love my own fucking brother without people thinking it’s…gay.”

“You’re right,” you choke. He’s kissing the corner of your eye and you’re about to burst!

“It’s everywhere, Dirk.”

“I know.”

“We gotta stop it.”

“I know.”

Finally he leans back, both palms resting on each of your shoulders. 

Tentatively and even with his own bashful smile, an acknowledgement to his own awareness of how submissive it is, he lifts up his own shades. His eyes aren’t like your amber. They’re blood colored. But they’re a lot more innocent than yours. A lot more wide. What cynicism was there has been replaced by newfound faith.

“We’re doing this?”

You smile determinedly. 

“We’re doing this.”

Together, you clasp hands.

The soldier theme in your stories is probably a universal constant. If you’re not fighting for one thing, you’re fighting for another. But you like this one. It’s political. But it’s also familial. There’s something much more personal about it. It’s not like taking your brother’s arms and defeating the assassins who brought him down. It’s a completely different colored flag you’re picking up and waving in the street. Justice is still involved. Fighting is still involved. But now you’re together. And now it’s against a much less easily seen enemy. It likes to call itself internalized bigotry. And if you can help it, every loop you face with your brother from here on out…is going to be dedicated to putting a stop to it.


End file.
